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Thursday, November 12, 2015

`No Message for Children or for Lovers'

“Let
us endeavor to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to
complain. Whether to see life as it is, will give us much consolation, I know
not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth if any there be, is solid
and durable: that which may be derived from errour, must be, like its original,
fallacious and fugitive.”

The
words are from aletter Dr. Johnson wrote to his friend Bennet Langton on Sept.
21, 1758. They come as a respite from the aggrieved spirit of our own age. The
Oxford University scholar R.W. Chapman sees in them Johnson’s enduring
attraction:

“The
author of this advice was a man whom life had not used kindly. He was left, in
middle age, a childless widower, with no relations, and few friends of his own
generation. He had always been poor. He had never known health, or the
ineffaceable delights of a happy childhood. His marriage we may believe yielded
such happiness as its circumstances permitted.”

That’s
all we have a right to ask for, of course, but it doesn’t stop of us from
upping our demands like dictators and spoiled children. Johnson declined to
play the victim or blame life’s unfairness on others, and that’s what makes him
so convincing: he writes not theoretically but from life – his own life. I’ve written before about Chapman, who edited a one-volume edition of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., while manning an artillery position in
Macedonia during World War I. The essay quoted above, “Samuel Johnson,” was
written in 1926 and collected in Johnsonian
and Other Essays and Reviews (Clarendon Press, 1953). Chapman asks why
readers ought to “celebrate” Johnson. Unlike Shakespeare, he does not “lead us
into those dark places of the soul.” Unlike Plato or Shelley [!], he doesn’t “transport
us into brighter regions, or show us the spirit of man loosed from earthly
shackles.” In Johnson, Chapman finds something humbler and more reassuring: “He
is no magician; he is only Samuel Johnson, a moral writer.” One might argue
that a writer’s essential stuff, his
medium, along with words, is morals. It’s Johnson’s bluffness that earns our
trust. Chapman writes:

“His
religion is not a religion of joy. He has no message for children or for
lovers. . . .He will not let us soften the facts in our favour—he will always
insist that we `clear our minds of cant’. We feel that he knows the worst; but
we are confident that his understanding and his charity will not fail.”